How can one artistic medium incorporate elements of another? What does the interaction or cross-pollination between putatively separate media reveal about the form and function of art in postcolonial contexts? Introduced by American artist Dick Higgins (active in the 1960s avant-garde), the notion of intermedia captures relations between and across literature, music, visual art, photography, cinema, and performance. Scholars such as Daniel Albright, Werner Wolf, Irina Rajewsky, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jay David Bolter, and Richard Grusin have advanced our understanding of intermediality by elucidating specific intermedial pathways (e.g., poetic description of painting, cinematic incorporation of other media), even positing intermediality as the basis for a general theory of art. Most studies, however, originate in and focus on artists from Western Europe and the United States. Recent work by Tobias Döring, Birgit Neumann, Julio Prieto, and Katia Chornik suggests that in postcolonial contexts, intermediality can represent a potentially transgressive practice that challenges not only media borders but also power relations.

The objective of this special session is to examine the role of intermediality as a decolonial practice in three distinct Global South contexts. The session brings together as panelists three young scholars who have already begun to make important contributions to the fields of postcolonial and intermediality studies. Their presentations explore, on the one hand, what expressions from the Global South can contribute to our understanding of intermedial relations and, on the other, how intermediality opens up new spaces that disrupt capitalist relations, colonial hierarchies, and imperialist histories. Each of the three papers considers a different geographical region (Africa, Latin America, South Asia) and set of intermedial relations (video games and literature, visual poetry, performance/installation art).

Alexander Fyfe’s paper “Digital Decoloniality: Videogames in Contemporary African Fiction” is motivated by an increasing prominence of video games in African popular cultures. Focusing on novels by Angolan writer Pepetela and Congolese writer Koli Jean Bofane, Fyfe observes how protagonists use video games to imagine and build new civilizations that contrast with the precarious infrastructure, resource extraction, and disintegration characteristic of the built environments in which they live. The intermediality between literature and video games, Fyfe argues, brings about a reimagining of the distinction between rural and urban and allows protagonists to be “globalist” while “avoiding the damage that capitalism, neocolonialism, and extractivism do to [their] lived environments.”

While video games create virtual spaces for the protagonists of African novels, Latin American visual poetry reimagines space by expanding notions of textuality to treat bodies, textiles, and minor objects as poems. Isabella Vergara’s paper “Cecilia Vicuña’s Poems in Space” examines the decolonial visual poetry of Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña. Well known as a feminist, defender of indigenous culture, and critic of US imperialism, Vicuña combines practices of ritual and oral tradition in her visual poetry to challenge the “masculine, heteronormative, and hegemonic models that have dominated the Latin American cultural tradition.” This practice, Vergara argues, creates a space between writing and voice that opens up new modes of perception.

Our final presentation by Sandamini Ranwalage, “What the War-torn Bodies Recollect: Efficacies of Sri Lankan (Post)War Performance Art,” continues our examination of intermedial spaces through a reading of Sri Lankan performance artist Bandu Manamperi. By looking at the way Manamperi superimposes live performance within installation art, Ranwalage shows how war-torn bodies can become mnemonics of violence. In the context of the Sri Lankan civil war (with historical roots in British colonial rule), Ranwalage argues that intermediality represents “a subversive tool for the artist of the Global South to better represent the somatic effects of war on bodies and to reinstitute a historical and communal sense of self in the face of abstractions of imperial and national narratives of war.”

These three scholars are conducting urgent and groundbreaking work to further our understanding of intermediality as a decolonial practice outside dominant frameworks. With the goal of facilitating dialogue and highlighting resonances between the three papers, I have asked panelists to limit their presentations to 15 minutes and to pre-circulate their papers. I have invited Alejandro Martínez to serve as a respondent, opening our discussion by directing focused questions to the panelists based on the pre-circulated papers. Martínez’s comments will last no more than 5-10 minutes, leaving 15-20 minutes for general discussion. I selected this format because I have found it to be productive in past MLA panels. I believe that the role of a respondent will be generative, given the wide geographical scope of the presentations and our comparative approach.